☺ A retrospective on Pugs ☺ Ingo Blechschmidt <
[email protected]> Augsburg.pm (April 13th, 2015) Pugs, an experimental Perl 6 platform: a retrospective 1 / 37 April 13th, 2015 Abstract. “Hi. Today I have started working on specifying and implementing Feath- erweight Perl 6 (FP6), a side-effect-free subset of Perl 6.” Audrey Tang used these words to unveil the Pugs project in February of 2005. Initially conceived as an imple- mentation of a small subset of Perl 6 in Haskell, the project quickly grew to contain a full-fledged compiler and interpreter for Perl 6 and aracted a large and diverse community. e talk will give a subjective survey of the history of Pugs. We will pay particular aention to the special manner with which Audrey led the project and what the phi- losophy “-Ofun” meant to the developers. We’ll also discuss which parts of Pugs were absorbed into other implementations of Perl 6 and which influence Pugs had on the Perl and Haskell communities. About me. I contributed to Pugs as a school student in 2005, at first by porting modules and writing tests, then gradually also by writing Haskell code and later by implement- ing a JavaScript backend. Audrey and the unique spirit in the Pugs community had a strong and lasting influence on me (exposing me to Haskell, category theory, and a beautiful way of tending communities); I look back on very exciting and fun days. Warning. e account is mostly from memory and not properly researched. Try not to trust it! Also note that the timeline covers only the year 2005 and that the code excerpts are edited for legibility, i.